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Much of the recent focus has been on creating emergency shelters, but people living in them are still counted as homeless, Garrow said, and many of them have nowhere to go when they leave the shelter. "The county has done an abysmal job creating more permanent supportive housing and affordable housing," she said - and that's where she'd like to see future efforts focused. County officials see the detailed data as creating a new baseline that will help local government and nonprofits better tailor services to the needs of the homeless, spenq money more efficiently and more accurately measure results. This year's survey focused on vulnerable populations such as seniors 62 or older (677 seniors were counted), veterans (311 people with military service were recorded) and families (110 unsheltered families including 244 children were found). Officials in Anaheim, which has the county's second- largest homeless population after Santa Ana, weren't surprised by the 2019 data because they commissioned a similar survey of their city last year, city spokeswoman Lauren Gold said Wednesday. More of Anaheim's homeless residents found shelter between the 2018 and 2019 counts, and even more have left the streets since January to enter two new emergency shelters that came online in the past few months, Gold said. "We're really encouraged to see that a lot of people have accepted that offer of help and are starting that transition out of homelessness." Countywide, much has changed since the 2017 survey, when the Courtyard in Santa Ana had recently opened as Orange County's only publicly funded emergency shelter offering 24-hour, year-round assistance.